Wittgenstein's centenary essays

970 Book Reviews the numbers and statistics he uses, suspecting (rightly) the different sources to be biased. He is brought about to develop salutary margins of caution in everything he says, showing that a scientist’s work cannot be abstract neutrality, but on the contrary, critical impartiality. Roux’s book is a major contribution to the study of the Albanians in the Balkans (although it mainly deals with ethnic Albanians in what used to be Yugoslavia) a major contribution to the history of the integration of a part of the Balkans (Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Albania are excluded, when a reference to them is not instrumental to the topic), as well as a significant contribution to the history of the (dis)integration of Yugoslavia as a whole. Rada IvekoviC Universitt! de Paris-8 Wittgenstein’s Centenary Essays, ed. A. Phillips University Press, 1991), E10.95 P.B. Grifliths (Cambridge: Cambridge This is a collection of essays based on the 1989-1990 series of Royal Institute of Philosophy lectures given in London to mark the centenary of the birth of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). The collection is mixed, both in substance, style and quality. Notable contributions range from Crispin Wright’s relatively specialised discussion in ‘Wittgenstein on Mathematical Proof to Jacques Bouveresse’s historical discussion about Wittgenstein’s attitude to the political world in which he lived in “‘The Darkness of This Time”: Wittgenstein and the Modern World’. John Shotter’s ‘Wittgenstein and Psychology’ discusses the social aspect of Wittgenstein’s later work in light of the cognitive-oriented psychology practised widely today. And Frank Cioffi’s ‘Wittgenstein on Freud’s ‘ “Abominable Mess” ’ is a detailed piece which seeks to clarify Wittgenstein’s accusation that Freud has conflated reasons and causes. The rule-following considerations of Philosophical Investigations, which have been brought to attention in the last lO- 12 years by Crispin Wright and Saul Kripke, are discussed by Shotter, Wright, Trigg, Grayling and O’Hear. Peter Winch’s ‘Certainty and Authority’ and Renford Bambrough’s ‘Fools and Heretics’ both advert to remarks Wittgenstein makes in On Certainty and relate them to questions about the nature of political authority and the resolution of conflict, respectively. I cannot begin to elaborate all of the essays presented in this collection, so I shall limit myself to giving some brief examples of the diverse matters discussed, and attempt to draw attention to questions which might arise from these discussions. I shall focus most attention on Wright’s article. Roger Trigg’s ‘Wittgenstein and Social Science’ argues that ‘Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the social character of concepts makes the task of sociai science. . . an impossible one’, and that ‘in rooting our reason in society, he makes it impossible to reason about society’. Trigg’s discussion is thought-provoking but unfortunately remains at the rather abstract and non-penetrating level of the above-expressed thought. What, for example, is a claim that the social scientist wants to make that is precluded by Wittgenstein’s dismissal of History of European Ideas Book Reviews metaphysics? Trigg claims that social scientists have to do more than describe how their subjects conceive the world, or else ‘everything would be apparent at the surface of society’. But this is an odd claim. One would have thought that uncovering the assumptions, expectations, or ‘rules’ by which societies function would be an immensely complicated undertaking, even if one merely restricted one’s task to description. In particular, if it is an alien society, then the interpreter’s own descriptions, though perhaps not ‘unbiased’ in a way natural scientists aspire to, is none the less informative to those in the interpreter’s own culture. These are merely preliminary thoughts, but the issues discussed here certainly bear deeper and perhaps more philosophical scrutiny. In ‘Certainty and Authority’, Peter Winch attempts to bring to bear questions about the nature of practical rationality that Wittgenstein considers in On Certainty to ‘deep’ questions in political philosophy regarding the nature of the state’s authority, and the role of consent. He argues that Wittgenstein has given us insight on the traditional puzzle of reconciling the notion of a state’s authority with the notion of (individual) agency, in so far as Wittgenstein has showed us a way of rejecting the assumptions that make it a puzzle: So far from its being the case that all recognition of authority derives from the exercise of practical reason on the part of the recognizer, the notion of practical reason itself requires at many points a recognition of the authority of others that is primitive. The problem, of course, for any political theorist faced with the claim that our recognition of the authority of others is primitive, is how to reconcile this with the very deeply-rooted intuition that at least in certain cases the authority recognised seems perverse, and cries out for justification. But if justification is not appropriate here since recognition of authority is primitive, how can the (intuitively compelling) possibility of unjust authority be understood? In ‘Fools and Heretics’, Renford Brambrough also discusses passages from On Certainty in which Wittgenstein discusses ‘pivots’ or the state reached in a conflict where the disputants in the conflict seem able only to reject one option or the other, but not reason itself. In an essay that was originally a lecture presented at Swansea, Bambrough urges us to see that inner (intrapersonal) and outer (interpersonal) conflict share a common structure. In order for conversion to occur, the converted must be a single person. In order for conflict to be resolved the ‘two parties to the conflict should share some beliefs and understanding that are relevant to the making of a decision’. He concludes from this that no conflict is total, and that conflict presupposes shared belief in such a way that ‘there is inexhaustible scope for further enquiry’. Wright’s article, ‘Wittgenstein on Mathematical Proof attempts to explore whether the rule-following considerations of the Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of M athematics can be used to understand Wittgenstein’s apparently antirealist views on logical necessity. Wright begins by articulating an intuitively plausible philosophy of mathematics-mathematical realism -according to which the mathematician is a type of explorer. He uses proofs as a kind of tool to make up for his cognitive deficiencies (limited memory capacity, limited time) to investigate the infinite totalities to which he has no other recourse. To investigate infinite totalities the mathematical realist need not be committed to the existence of a platonic substrate of mathematical objects: It is enough if we are capable of creating, in thought, a sufftciently definite concept of the series of natural numbers to give substance to questions about its characteristics which we may not know how to answer. Wittgenstein’s view, by contrast, is that Volume 18, No. 6, November 1994 972 Book Reviews mathematics is not a project of exploration and discovery, mathematical proof is not an instrument whereby we find out things . .; there is no external compulsion upon us when we ratify proofs-we are driven, but not by cognition of an external, normative constraint, and insofar as there is a special sureness about at least some mathematical propositions, it does not amount to a superlative genre of knowledge-such propositions do not enjoy a zyxwvutsrqponmlkjih cognitive certainty at all. Wright reconsiders an earlier suggestion of his (also made by Kripke) that the rulefollowing considerations of the Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of M athematics throw light on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. Wright argues that neither a Kripke-style meaning scepticism, nor even a more modest interpretation of the rule-following considerations that does not question the factuality of meaning but questions, very roughly, the idea that our getting the meaning correct can constitute a cognitive achievement, can explain or account for all of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the philosophy of mathematics. The reason, simply, is that the factual or epistemological challenge manifested by the discussion on rules infects all discourse. But, as Wright maintains, Wittgenstein wanted his remarks about mathematics to indicate a distinct thesis about the status of proofs. For Wittgenstein, proofs are, importantly, not like experiments and do not provide us with the means of making discoveries in that sense. But, if the discussion on rules has the global consequences that Wright describes, Wittgenstein will not be allowed to retain the contrast between discovery and invention that he needs. According to Wright: In Wittgenstein’s view, the internal relations which articulate the interconnections within a proof are acknowledged by way of institution or custom, following on empirical findings. And this background of unreflective custom is not something in which our participation is imposed by purely cognitive considerations. So a faultless understanding of each of the notions in play in a proof and a full empirical awareness of its detail underdetermine assent to it; one needs, in addition, to be party to the relevant practices . . . [thus] proofs are not instruments of discovery. In the end, Wright voices a worry about how Wittgenstein means to invoke customs here. If he means that without the relevant custom we could have the very same arithmetical practices while still having the choice of answers to some proposed problem, then something has surely gone wrong. For understanding the concept of afunction and its one-output character is essential to one’s grasp of arithmetic. But surely Wittgenstein can make the same point about the ‘logical must’ here too. We have defined adding so that only one solution to some proposed calculation is possible, and of course we would not consider that anyone was adding who did not respect this constraint. But this is not because the concept of mathematical functions is somehow independent of the customs which we adopt when we reject the calculation as one of addition. It seems illegitimate, in other words, to spin counterfactual situations in which our intuitions seem to tell against the situation under scrutiny, since, after all, these intuitions will be the product of our customs. This collection of essays succeeds in manifesting the diversity of possible applications of Wittgenstein’s thought to issues in, for example, politics, religion, mathematics, psychology, psychoanalysis and aesthetics. But there are other essays-Anscombe’s, for example-which attempt merely to explore carefully and even arduously some rather specific point Wittgenstein attempts to make. And here we get a demonstration of the History of European Ideas Book Reviews 973 method this unique philosopher cultivated to work his way through philosophical perplexities. To the extent that the essays are suggestive ofpossible applications, so too are they provocative, and invite further reflection and discussion. Julia Tanney The University of Sheffield Pluralism, Socialism and Political Legitimacy. Reflections on Opening Up Communism, F. M. Barnard (Cambridge University Press, 1991), xii + 189 pp., 527.95 H.B. Writing philosophical works is a timeless pursuit. Creating a work in philosophy of politics is much more bound to mirror the chosen epoch, and reflecting on the ‘openingup’ of communism, as Frederick Mechner Barnard, Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Western Ontario, does in his Pluralism, Socialism and Political Legitimacy , is an extremely time-sensitive enterprise. And if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then the kind of pudding prepared by the ‘Really Existing Socialism’ has been eaten up to the last crumb and the proof is, to say the least, at variance with some of Professor Barnard’s assertions. Or rather with those which the Czech constitutional lawyer Dr Vladimir KlokoEka had made many years ago and which Professor Barnard took at face value. A preliminary word of explanation may be needed concerning the structure of the present book. An appendix of some 30 pages summarises the views on electoral confrontation under socialism, as stated a quarter of a century ago by Dr KlokoEka.’ This appendix would deserve a special dissertation centred on its Orwellian context. The Big Brother was indeed closely watching every move by the protagonists of the Prague Spring and by those engaged-like Dr KlokoEka-in several party-appointed think-tanks providing the former with ideas, sometimes bold and unorthodox, sometimes merely time-serving. Poker-faced, Dr KlokoEka writes: ‘The much-stressed fear of the restoration of capitalism in developed socialist countries should, in this connection, be seen for what it is. In our view it is not a real danger. In a developed socialist society, in a state of advanced industrialisation, the idea of the restoration of capitalism is almost an anachronism’ (p. 168). Instead of being taken at its face value, such a statement is crying out for a circumstantial exegesis, taking into account both the Orwellian atmosphere of the time and the spirit of the place of its origin epitomised by HaSek and Kafka. A philosophical work might gain the esteem of readers by the rational nature of its argumentation and by the persuasiveness of the empirical evidence. While Barnard’s book does not lack rational argumentation, often coupled with shrewd insight into the weaknesses of alternative positions, it is the meagre support by empirical evidence which makes the whole content of this book so questionable. It is not easy to summarise a work which the author himself defines ‘as an essay in the broader understanding of political philosophy rather than as one of the more specialised, or more systematic, modes of inquiry into Communist regimes’ (p. xi). He ‘discovered in the debate of the Prague Spring larger questions about the nature and status of political Volume 18, No. 6, November 1994